Critical Linking: February 24th, 2014

You would think winning a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction would ensure an enduring literary legacy. Not always – a number of Pulitzer-winning books are out-of-print. With this year’s announcement later today, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of forgotten winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel as the award was known prior to 1948.

In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009.

Greenfield says not to look for a permanent slowdown in ebook growth in 2014 and beyond. “I don’t think this is a trend that will continue indefinitely,” he says. “I think as more people buy tablets, smartphones, and e-readers-and more children grow up with digital reading as a normal part of their lives-ebooks will continue to gain market share.”